Foreign workers utilizing employment Visas should be required to spend the majority of the paycheck that they make HERE!
A significant portion of high-paying jobs in tech are held by people who send all their money back to countries like India or China. I don’t care if this is ‘legal’, it is destroying our labor market.
There is currently no oversight/restrictions on remittances coming out of the US beyond laws like Dodd-Frank and a patchwork of legal precedent.
Immigrants are coming to this country, often the ones who compete for high-skilled positions, and are sending the majority of their paychecks abroad, to countries where a US dollar will get them infinitely more value. This process, in effect, extracts value and spending away from the US and sends our wealth abroad.
This has had massively negative effects on the high-skilled labor market in the US from both American and Foreign perspectives:
- The outsourcing of labor and massive increase in legal immigration has created a reliance on other countries in key industries (think defense, cybersecurity, etc.) We’ve obviously seen ways in which this has decreased quality of our services, just look at what happened with Crowdstrike. Cutting remittances would open up these positions to Americans once more.
- The leverage that companies have over foreign workers has grown immensely. Because one’s Visa is intrinsically linked to their employment with a certain company, foreign workers have literally no ability to request higher pay or address problems with their working environment. This means that, beyond just an increased labor pool, companies have been further incentivized to outsource jobs through programs like H1B because they can offer artificially low salaries with guarantees that workers will take the role.
The result of this has been a massive loss for Americans in the high-skilled labor market, foreign workers being effectively enslaved to do jobs at a margin of the price, and a massive decrease in the quality of services along with the loss of trade secrets to countries like India and China.
There needs to be extensive oversight analyzing remittances, a significant reduction in how much of OUR capital we allow workers to send abroad, as well as massive cuts in these employment Visa programs.
Banning, or at least significantly restricting, remittances is a good first step as it will incentivize foreign workers to find work in their home countries and reduce the leverage large corporations have over our labor market (on Americans and foreign workers).